When
she met her longtime live-in boyfriend, Pablo, in 2002, she had no idea what
the man would become.

About this
series:

This
is the fourth in a five-part series exploring domestic violence and its
implications in Forsyth County and across the nation. A growing problem that is
not often spoken about, the timing of this series falls during October’s national
Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Victims’ names have been changed to protect
their identities and certain locations remain vague for safety purposes.

“I
was living in New York and he was a taxi driver who I had contracted to drive
me back and forth to appointments,” Patricia said. “We were both from the same
country, so I mean, same country, of course we became friends; that’s how our
relationship got started.

“In
New York, there was very little work, so we came [to Georgia] in 2004 to try
our luck. The violence started a year later. He was like a different person
than who I met in 2002.”

The
abuse – physical, emotional, financial and sexual – was constant for Patricia.

Two
to three times a week for six years, she said, from 2005 to 2011, Pablo punched
her, yanked her hair and threw her against walls in their Gwinnett County home.

Daily,
he called her names. He told her she would be nothing without him.

None
of it hurt as much as when he touched her daughter, though.

“He
did hit my 14-year-old daughter several times,” Patricia said. “On one
occasion, he grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the wall. She
tried to [fight] him, but he was too strong.”

The silent
victims

Each
year nationwide, millions of children are exposed to domestic violence.

According
to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV,) in 2016, at least 15.5
million children witnessed domestic violence at least once, though the number
is likely higher, based on information from the National Child Traumatic Stress
Network (NCTSN).

Established
in 2000 by the U.S. Congress, NCTSN works with researchers, experts, health
professionals and others to provide information about and solutions to
childhood trauma, which can be caused by any number of events.

One
of those is family violence.

“Children
who live with domestic violence have been called the ‘silent’ or ‘hidden’
victims of [domestic] violence because their presence is often overlooked by
the parents and caregivers or unknown by observers and professionals,” a NCTSN
fact sheet said. “Adult victims may be hesitant to disclose to police, hospital
staff, or child welfare workers that their children have seen the violence.

“This
may be due to embarrassment, fear of retaliation or harm, or fear that their
children might be removed from their care by Child Protective Services.
Professionals who come in contact with these children and families may not ask
about children’s exposure to domestic violence because they are wary of
offending caregivers or because they do not know what to do to help the
children they do identify. In these cases, children are not linked with
services.”

In
Georgia in 2014, children witnessed 29 percent of intimate partner violence, NCADV
data said, and in 2016, a report by the Georgia Commission on Family Violence
(GCFV) found “in 37 percent of the cases studied by Georgia’s Domestic Violence
Fatality Review Project, children witnessed the domestic violence homicide.”

While
Pablo never had the chance to kill Patricia – she left the day after he said he
would kill her and the children – she said his violence didn’t discriminate.

“He
didn’t care – the [physical violence] occurred two to three times a week, kids
or no kids around,” she said. “It didn’t make any difference to him. And the
sexual abuse with me was often. Never with the kids, but with me, [it was]
whenever he wanted to.”

“So he wouldn’t
get hurt”

Lt.
Andy Kalin with the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office’s Major Crimes Unit said
children can be an asset to law enforcement.

“I’ve
[spent] 37 years doing this – I did child abuse for 12 – and I think that’s the
misnomer that people often [miss], even cops,” he said. “Children as [young] as
4, 5 years old are excellent witnesses because they don’t know how to lie; they
haven’t formulated that mental capacity about lying.

“You
get a lot of information out of kids’ mouths, especially even at that young age
that you would not believe would be such great information. We need to spend
more time interviewing kids.”

Oftentimes,
however – and through no fault of their own – Kalin said, children often
complicate the domestic violence dynamic.

“Some
kids are bigger and do step in and that’s where you get to the family violence,
but again, we’re back to that [family] unit and you have to know the dynamic of
why the kid, maybe, just punched out his dad,” he said. “He’d been watching his
dad beat the crap out of his mom for five years, but this kid just laid a lick
on dad and the kid could go to jail.

“You
really have to have experienced people involved in [law enforcement] and
investigating it; it’s a crazy dynamic and it’s very, very complicated. It’s
all complicated by love – that’s where it all starts.”

That
love, Patricia said, is why she never asked her sons to intervene, and even
begged her second oldest – she had three teenage children from a previous
relationship and two children that were Pablo’s – to not engage Pablo on one
occasion.

“He
never touched his children, and [mostly,] not the boys either,” she said. “They
would just ignore him. They were close to engaging [Pablo] in a fight one time,
but that didn’t take place.

“[Pablo]
had hit me that one time and my second boy tried to hit him, to prevent him
from continuing to hit me. But I asked him not to so that he wouldn’t get
hurt.”

Instead,
Pablo picked on Sophia, Patricia’s middle child.

“It’s
amazing that she was able to process all this,” Patricia said. “She is doing
well and is now married, but [I taught her] to look for some of the signs that
someone is abusive, like the controlling of finances, or calling her names or
controlling who her friends are.

“I
[made sure] she was aware those signs were red flags and always told her not to
wait until something escalates, and her husband is not abusive.”

Breaking the
cycle

Patricia
doesn’t know where Pablo’s violence came from.

Though
she credits some of it to his drinking, which she said was an everyday
occurrence, the aggression and violence was not isolated to drinking and just
as often continued when he was sober, anywhere and anytime.

Executive
Director of Forsyth County Family Haven, a domestic violence advocacy
organization and emergency shelter for women and their children, Shandra
Dawkins, said family violence doesn’t discriminate and can’t be blamed on any
one reason.

“It’s
what we call a continued pattern of behavior,” she said. “A lot of times,
individuals use excuses for violence such as substance abuse, mental health
issues and things of that nature, but that’s the catalyst, not the reason,
because often women are being abused when someone is not utilizing or anything
of that nature.

“I
always use the scenario with women, [asking] does your mate, who is abusive to
you, go to work and he’s angry and physically assault his boss and yell and
scream at him? No. He waits until he comes home and changes his behavior to
aggression towards you. It’s a controlled behavior because he knows how to
control it, who, when, where and how long and how severe he wants to abuse the
victim.”

Despite
having little control over when, where and how Pablo would abuse her, Patricia
said she always had control of what she taught her children, which was to break
the cycle of abuse.

According
to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, research shows that about one-third
of all individuals who were abused or neglected as children will subject their
children to maltreatment.

“This
cycle of abuse can occur when children who either experienced maltreatment or
witnessed violence between their parents or caregivers learn to use physical
punishment as a means of parenting their own children,” the organization says.

Patricia
said her children will not be – and are not – part of that one-third.

“My
two younger daughters – [Pablo’s] daughters – were in therapy until not long
ago,” she said. “They were young when [the abuse] occurred.

“I
made it a point to teach [the boys], because they saw it all, that it’s not a
manly thing to lay hands on a woman or be controlling or name calling, things
like that. They are doing well in that regard; they are not abusive.”

Dawkins
said she has seen these kinds of success cases.

“There’s
lots of different data that talks about what an abuser looks like, but
personally, from doing this work for 30 years, it’s all about power and control
over another individual,” she said, “and there’s not one specific reason why.
Often people say if you grow up in a home where there’s domestic violence, you
have a greater chance, if you’re a male, to become an abuser and a little girl
has a greater chance at becoming a victim, but I’m seeing scenarios of people
growing up in a [violent] home and they take the high road and they’re not
abusive at all.

“Domestic
violence is an equal opportunity destroyer,” Dawkins said. “It doesn’t care who
you are, where you live, what socioeconomic status, what race, what religion or
sexual preference; anyone can be a victim.”